From secrecy to conflicts of interest: Rex Tillerson fails his six-month performance review

Today marks six months of former ExxonMobil CEO Rex
Tillerson’s tenure as US Secretary of State – the person leading America’s
foreign policy. So how well is he performing in his new job? 181 days in,
there’s more cause for alarm than praise.

When Tillerson’s nomination was announced we expressed serious
concerns
about his ability to protect national security and act in the public interest,
given his track
record at the helm of ExxonMobil. These concerns stemmed from our extensive
experience investigating corruption around the world, showing that ExxonMobil
and its predecessors repeatedly engaged in questionable oil deals and transactions,
including with corruption-plagued governments of Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria,
Kazakhstan, Angola and Chad. USA
Today further reported that ExxonMobil did business with Iran, Syria and
Sudan through a European subsidiary while those countries were subject to US
anti-terrorism sanctions.

We also joined other environmental groups in challenging
Tillerson’s fitness to serve as the top US climate dealmaker in light of
ongoing investigations into ExxonMobil intentionally misleading its investors
and the public on climate change science.

Has Tillerson surprised us and proven us wrong? If only. The
past few months have seen an unprecedented rollback of key anti-corruption, climate
and environmental measures at the behest of the fossil fuel industry.

To start with, the very first act of law by the new Congress
and President was to undo
a key transparency regulation requiring US gas and oil companies to
disclose payments they make to governments around the world. This decision was
a huge gift to big oil, who ardently opposed the regulation. Tillerson himself
had personally
lobbied US Congress against this law. Without this payment transparency,
it’s even more difficult to ensure oil deals pursued by Exxon and other major
oil companies are free from corruption. Even Exxon’s competitors, like Russian
state-owned oil companies Gazprom and Rosneft, report this information in other
countries.

Moreover, US participation in an important global extractive
transparency program, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is
now on
life support, in large part due to the failure
of companies like Exxon and Chevron to declare their US tax payments. This
theme of tax secrecy is a familiar one – just look at President Trump: he broke
a long-standing practice of presidential candidates disclosing their tax
returns to keep his hidden. Tillerson similarly refused
to provide his tax returns as part of his confirmation process. Lack of
transparency in the Trump administration doesn’t stop there – much like the
White House, Tillerson’s State Department has broken
with the practices of holding regular daily press briefings and traveling with
a press pool on official state visits. While secrecy and press aversion might
have been the norm in Tillerson’s corporate context, it is unacceptable to
carry these habits over into high-profile public service.

When it comes to conflicts of interest, matters ought to be
clear, as federal ethics rules require Tillerson to fully divest and recuse
himself from any matters directly involving his former company for one year,
and he has pledged
to comply. But it appears that Tillerson is not complying willingly: he didn’t recuse
himself from the State Department Keystone pipeline decision until he came under
pressure from Greenpeace. Tillerson attending a signing ceremony for a major
ExxonMobil deal in Saudi Arabia during an official state visit also raised questions
about Tillerson’s compliance with relevant ethics rules (unsurprisingly, US
press weren’t allowed there either).

A major area where Tillerson’s loyalties have come into
question is Russia, where he previously led Exxon in making deals with state
oil giant Rosneft. Most of these deals are on hold as a result of US sanctions
against Rosneft and its boss Igor Sechin, a personal friend of Tillerson’s. Last
week ExxonMobil was fined US$2 million by the Treasury Department for Russia
sanctions violations while Tillerson was the CEO. At the same time, the company is lobbying hard against the latest Congressional attempt to toughen those sanctions,
something that Tillerson also opposes.

Of course, ethical problems are not limited to Rex Tillerson;
they pervade the entire Trump administration. The Sunlight
Foundation’s review of the first six months of the Trump administration
concluded that this is “a secretive administration, allergic to transparency,
ethically compromised.” But no one personifies these themes and the takeover of
the US government by fossil fuel industry interests better than Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson. Rex’s report card from diplomacy school would state “Rex
shows plenty of room for improvement. He needs to work on his science
knowledge, make new friends, and stop hanging about with the rough boys”.